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Intimate Photos Reveal the Day-to-Day Lives of Stormtroopers

Going all Jean-Claude Van Damme and doing an epic split on some speeder bikes. (Expand the gallery for the best experience.)

Waiting at the AT-AT stop. (Those things are always late.)

Investigating a crime scene. Move along … move along.

Removing a wounded Stormtrooper—and the head of a battle droid—from the battlefield.

Burying a fallen soldier of the Galactic Empire.

Getting a beatdown from a Sith Lord.

Feeding the—surprisingly GIGANTIC—chicks on the Empire's farm.

Pulling a fallen fellow soldier out of harm's way.

Roughing up a battle droid.

Capturing an outlaw and bringing him to justice.

In the Star Wars movies, the Imperial Stormtroopers' activities are pretty limited: Marching. Shooting things. Keeping order. More marching. What do they do the rest of the time? Twerk? Wait for the bus and bully battle droids like the rest of us? (OK, most of us don't bully battle droids.) Photographer Zahir Batin has a few ideas, and they include feeding baby chickens.

Batin's still-life photos, created with action figures and largely homemade props, provide a glimpse of Stormtroopers after the big battles—stringing crime scene tape, for example, and doing the splits, Jean-Claude Van Damme-style, on their 74-Z speeder bikes. But the Malaysian photographer's pictures also reveal a grimmer reality. We see troopers carrying wounded soldiers from the battlefield and mourning fallen comrades. We also see dichotomy of life as a Stormtrooper, roughing up battle droids one moment and feeding chicks the next.

The photo series is "just a hobby to fill free time on the weekends," Batin says, but it's blossomed into dozens of pictures. The bulk of the time spent creating each image is spent on preparation. Because "my Photoshop skills have a limit," Batin tries to make each scene as realistic as possible before snapping the frame. The resulting pictures are as gorgeous as they are humorous (or, of course, tragic).

Check out some of the photographer's best Stormtrooper still-life photos in the gallery above, then check out even more on deviantArt and 500px.